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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

As far as phone quality goes,

    cell < landline < skype

For me, having a conversation on a cell takes some effort, and it's tiring. A conversation via landline is much more comfortable, and skype is best. This is all due to the voice quality.

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Lots of cell carriers are starting to do HD voice with VoLTE. It's definitely helped a bit, but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of crosscarrier compatibility.

I like Skype or Hangouts. I think the latency is a lot lower. When I'm on the cell, I feel like I'm always talking over people.

Cell phone quality hasn't improved since my first cell phone in the early 90's. Everything else is far better but that.

Also, voice transmission only happens when the phone detects a voice, and this has the effect of clipping off the very first part of your sentence. I'd find this highly irritating, but I've noticed it a lot less in the last few years. Perhaps that has been fixed.

The killer feature of non-telephone voice services like Skype/GotoMeeting/etc is that it shows you who is speaking. It's a small thing, but it makes a huge difference.

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